This is not one of those aimless listings of WordPress Themes. This is10 ... Theme; Best Beautiful And Responsive WordPress Theme For 2014.
The winner, with a highly-impressive PageSpeed Insights score of 96, was Frank, a collaboration between P.J Onori and Jon Christopher.
This simple, responsive, theme is certainly content focussed, is lean on images and script (there are no javascript frameworks). The entire focus is on delivering a “simple, no-frills, screaming fast blog”.
If that’s your thing then Frank is for you.
It is also, according to Onori, “never finished”; staying true to that maxim, the theme is only available from GitHub.
Best Free Masonry WordPress Theme
You might think that masonry style themes are only for Pinterest clones but they’ve actually got legs for a number of scenarios.
Not least would be those sites that publish very frequently and want to expose plenty of content and find that a slider just doesn’t cut it.
Baskerville, out of the hugely impressive Anders Norén’s theme stable, meets the bold claim of being a “beautiful, responsive and retina-ready masonry theme”.
It works brilliantly across all platforms and exhibits incredible attention to detail from the pointers on the headings, to the feature image hover bounce effect, highly stylized post metadata and the innovative display of the search form.
Definitely one to bookmark.
Best Magazine WordPress Theme That Works On Tablets
There are possibly hundreds of themes in the WordPress Theme repository that claim to be “perfect for magazine sites”.
Once you start testing them, though, you find that precious few work across all platforms – a requirement you’d have thought fairly critical given the seemingly unstoppable rise of content consumption on tablets.
And let’s not even get started as to what actually is a magazine theme.
Bushwick, built by James Dinsdale for Automattic, is my idea of how a magazine theme should look and feel.
Whilst clearly a lot of thought has gone into creating the optimal layout for each platform, Bushwick looks and feels best on a tablet with its gorgeous full-screen featured images, amazingly clear typography and the simple to use navigation.
A prime example where less-is-more excels in providing a great user experience away from the desktop.
Bushwick is also available to WordPress.com users.
Note: If you use Bushwick, be sure to read the original article (Contenders button) for a small fix and tweak to improve Bushwick even further.
Best Free Video WordPress Theme
You create videos on a regular basis; you want a quick and easy way to make them available on a site that you can brand as your own.
You need Stumblr from Eleven Themes.
Not surprisingly, given the derivative of its name, this a Tumblr-style theme, designed to make the most of the content, hence the minimal design.
No frills here, just an effective theme for delivering video and images.
Best Fullscreen WordPress Theme
Full-screen themes are themes that, at the homepage at least, occupy just one screen – be it desktop or tablet. No vertical scrolling.
And whilst many do this job really well, providing support for full-screen video, photo sliders, with or without audio, they feel like two completely separate websites that have been cut and shut.
Not so Muse from Grand Pixels, available via ThemeForest at $48 for a regular licence.
Muse feels integrated and, importantly, provides some clue to the casual visitor as to what the site is actually about.
The theme responds flawlessly on a tablet (the front page slider is swipeable) and has engaging post and video layouts.
Clearly tailored to the music industry (with presumably industry-specific custom post types) it’s actually not difficult to see Muse being useful to not just music sites.
Best Slider WordPress Theme
Okay, so if you want to go for a slider theme (and there’s quite a lot commentary out there on why this might not be optimal), my feeling is that you should go the whole hog and only have a slider on that home page.
Otherwise it’s not a slider theme just a theme with a slider.
Once you make that distinction, the list of contenders becomes pretty small but the pick from the short-short-list is Fuse, from pixelgrade via ThemeForest ($48 for a standard licence).
It confidently goes full-screen for the slider but with the captions it’s relatively easy to ensure that the visitor knows what’s going on.
Responding well to smaller devices (it actually looks better on a tablet), the slides are swipeable and the various site components feel nicely integrated.
Best Coming Soon WordPress Theme (Or Plugin)
A little bit of cheating here, as the best Coming Soon theme is actually a plugin.
And it was pretty easy to pick the winner in this category as all the other contenders were fundamentally flawed. Let me explain.
If you put up a Coming Soon (and that’s a pretty big if to start with) then there are only a couple of specific circumstances where you’d want a countdown. Otherwise you are shooting yourself in the foot.
Firstly, you are fixing a deadline and we all know that deadlines move. Secondly, a deadline too far in the future, no matter how accurate, is going to send visitors packing. Thirdly, why would anyone care? Unless your site is something unbelievably interesting, no-one’s going to come back and check on progress (the progress bars are even worse).
What you need is for the Coming Soon to look half-decent, provide enough space to briefly describe the project, and the capability of collecting an email address should the visitor wish to be notified when you are up and running.
The Ultimate Coming Soon Page plugin does all this as well as letting those signed into the site see the real theme.
Comes in free and premium versions.
Best Free Responsive WordPress Theme
Rae’s original post continues to draw in the crowds with over 120,000 views since it was published in March.
So, clearly there is something wrong with me that I struggled to find a theme in a list of 30 that really appealed to me.
I was hoping for some originality, something that would make me nod my head and go “nice”, anything that I hadn’t seen before.
In the end, I picked Gridster because although not entirely original, it’s a really nice implementation of a grid layout which is a fantastic method to surface plenty of content.
Best Free Blog WordPress Theme
Remember when we used to use WordPress for the simple pure art that is blogging?
Spend enough time trawling through WordPress themes (or even worse, writing about them!) and it’s easy to forget. I must be getting old, because it all seemed so simple back then.
If you are going all retro and you are confident in the value of your content then you need look no further than Graphy.
A simple, true single-column theme with great typography, a 3 widget footer, that uses excerpts by default for post listings (yay!), Graphy really does put the focus on the content.
My only small gripe is that the inline images that hang so prettily on Chrome (and probably Firefox), don’t on Safari (including iOS), which is a shame.
Best Beautiful And Responsive WordPress Theme For 2014
OK, so that headline should probably be suffixed with “so far” but crikey, Ink is a beautiful theme.
If you are a regular reader of this blog then you’ll know that I have a bit of a thing about content and publishing and as soon as I opened up this theme it immediately started pushing those buttons.
The most engaging post listing I’ve seen, those featured images become full-screen on the single post display both on the desktop and on a tablet. There’s even a helpful little down arrow that not only helps the reader to get to the content but also acts as a visual cue that there is more to read.
Typography is clean and easy to read, there’s separate treatment for an intro (possibly the extract) and image based post-navigation.
Add that my personal fave of a slideout sidebar and this is definitely a theme that I wouldn’t mind paying the $43 for.
If you are looking for a theme for a publication with decent images then you might want to also.
You Cannot Be Serious!
Now, I know that you are not going to agree with these selections, even though there are some stunning themes in there.
And, I hope you don’t because really a theme is such a personal selection and it would be an appalling situation if we all liked the same thing.
So, if you have a favorite theme, leave a comment that includes:
- The name and link to your favorite theme
- The category you think it dominates (it can be a new category)
- What makes it so special
Who knows? We might come up with a definitive list of The Best of the Best WordPress Themes.
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